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Thursday, February 13, 2014

Battle Report: Frick vs Jexik! First Impressions

Hello there readers!Fainez: For this match I was playing as Frick, while King Flavid was playing with the new Cloaks summoner Jexik. For my deck's champions I used Dibs, The Feeder, and Krag. For the common's I had a heavy amount of fighters and clingers, two beast riders, and then one climber, oaf, and berserker. This was my first time playing both as Cave Goblins and as Frick.

Flavid: For this match I played as Jexik and ran Dagger, Hawk, and Spider as champions. My commons consisted of a heavier amount renegades, slashers, and bruisers, while I went lighter on the other commons. This was my first match playing as the Cloaks, as I had always viewed them as a weak faction with Vlox at the helm and avoided playing as them.

Fainez: I won the roll and elected to go first. I was able to make use of my clingers and the Jexik's odd starting setting up to get a line of 4 gobbies up in fighting position on turn one, getting some good swings in. The next few turns consisted of an absolute murder fest of commons, almost no event cards were played. As the opening aggression finished up, both of us were able to make use of openings to get at the enemy summoner. I was able to summon a beast rider with a clear lane at Jexik, and he grabbed a clinger on the way in. That gave me two units in the back of Flavid's board and I put a wound on Jexik. Flavid on the other hand was using Brilliant Strategist to march a bruiser over to Frick faster then I expected. That put at least two wounds on Frick. At this point Flavid decided to summon Hawk and send him forward, which became more of a problem than I expected. I took some wounds on Frick before being able to respond by summoning Dibs, who paid me back by going one for three on hawk two turns in a row. By now my attacking force of Cave Goblins had been destroyed from a lack of re-enforcements. then because of not being able to kill hawk quickly, and having a handful of events with no commons to use them on, Frick quickly fell.

Would give Hawk MVP of the match since he was one of only two champions summoned and he did far and away the most damage of any unit in the game.

Overall I really did like Frick and the cave goblins, I think I just needed to be less reckless with my commons. Even if they are zero cost, you still only have 18 of them total. Also drawing a mix of events and commons would have been nice, since the events for Frick seemed very good if I had been able to use them. I will be playing Frick again, with a few more beast riders and a tweak in my play style.

Flavid: I was pleasantly surprised with how well Jexik's deck played. I was able to dispose of many of Fainez's low cost, low health commons early on in the match, which allowed me to build tons of magic from the get go. As Fainez pointed out, the first several turns of the match consisted of the slaughtering of common units. Because of the nature of both factions used in this matchup, it was easy for both Fainez and myself to summon low cost common units at will to attack and quickly dispose of the low cost commons of the opposing faction. Unfortunately for Fainez, this back and forth slaughterfest ended when he began to get unlucky draws that left his hand filled with primarily event cards in lieu of cheap common units. This allowed me to begin moving in relatively uninhibited with Hawk, a bruiser, and a renegade to attack and eventually defeat Frick.

While Hawk likely did do the most damage of any unit in the game, I disagree with awarding him MVP. In this particular match, I felt that a number of different factors contributed to my eventual victory:

1. To start, I hate to appeal to the notion that luck has a significant effect on the outcome of any summoner wars match, but in this match, the luck clearly appeared to be in my favor. In the vast majority of summoner wars matches, luck tends to even itself out between both players as the number of dice rolled and cards drawn increases. However, in this match, Fainez hit a string of bad luck at the wrong time with both card drawing and dice rolling, and I think it would have been a very different game had his luck swung the other way.

2. Renegade commons are incredible! As I mentioned above, this was my first match playing as the cloaks, so I was not aware of Renegades and their abilities before the match, but they proved useful in this particular match from start to finish. As a 1 cost common with 2 health PLUS the ability to attack instead of moving and vice versa makes this common unit an incredible value and IMO one of the top 5 commons in the game.

3. Brilliant strategist is very, very useful. This ability was instrumental in setting up some of my early attacks on Frick and was a large reason why I was able to quickly trap and defeat him on his end of the board. Having the ability to essentially move ANY unit that you control 4 spaces in one turn will lead to swift and unexpected attacks on the opponents summoner. This ability was especially effective when used on renegade units, which allows them to get in position adjacent to an enemy without using a "move", which can instead be used to attack, and then attack again during the attack phase. I found that 80% of the time I used the brilliant strategist ability during my turn, however, there are definitely advantages to using it during your opponents.

Overall, I really enjoyed playing with Jexik and was surprised at how strong the cloaks ended up being. Definitely a faction I'll play again in the future.